The Ebbing Tides of a Relationship

Jonathan and Ruby meet at a three-week Marine Biology Research station. Jonathan is a married man with children who is a botany teacher. Ruby is married with kids as well and teaches invertebrate zoology. On this three-week trip they grow close and have an affair that changes their lives forever. Andrea Barrett’s short story The Littoral Zone starts off by telling the readers the beginning of Jonathan and Ruby’s story fifteen years later. Throughout the story, Barrett switches from past to present and ends the story with the beginning. The chronological order of the story plays a pivotal role in showing the significance of the setting, analyzing the characters, and revealing the theme to the audience.
Jonathan and Ruby are surrounded by ocean. It is throughout the different lectures that they here from fellow teachers that they remember their first conversation. They both agree that their first “real conversation took place on the afternoon devoted to the littoral zone.” The idea of the littoral zone is crucial in the story because it symbolizes their relationship. Andrea Barrett describes a littoral zone as “that space between high and low watermarks where organism s struggled to adapt to the daily rhythm of immersion and exposure.” In a littoral zone when an organism is struggling to adapt they sometimes die. The relationship between Jonathan and Ruby does just that. In the beginning their relationship was like a high-tide rushing in and full of excitement and the low tide is like the end of their relationship, fifteen years later, dull and full of guilt about their past. The tides also play a role because they mimic the chronological order of the story. Like tides, the story goes back and forth and without the past and present switches throughout the story the readers would not feel the emotions of excitement and loss that the characters convey.
Jonathon is flat and one-dimensional. This is demonstrated after Jonathan and Ruby have sex. Ruby wakes up and describes Jonathan’s sleeping form as of that of a “child.” While he is sound asleep not even seeming to be dwelling on the seriousness of what they did, Ruby is up cleaning up the mess they made. She is the one who wakes him up so that they both can go back to “where they are supposed to be.” He is struggling internally with his adultery which is a characteristic of a three-dimensional person but what makes him ultimately one-dimensional is the fact that he does not do anything about it and just wallows in his guilt.
 Ruby as well is a flat one-dimensional character because she, just like Jonathan, is upset about their choices in the past but chooses not to do anything about it. What is different about Ruby, which actually makes her not so likeable, is that she realizes in the beginning of their relationship her disappointment. As I mentioned before a good example of this would be when Ruby is sweeping up the glass they broke earlier while Jonathan is still sleeping. Instead of staying next to him and still feeling the passion that they both just experienced it seems that she realized that the moment they had together was gone. Why else would she describe the man she was in love with sleeping position as looking like a “child?” Barrett gives a hint through this statement that Ruby begins to feel her disappointment long before fifteen years go by.
The theme of The littoral Zone is that people will risk everything just for a moment of excitement. Barrett conveys this theme to the reader by showing them sitting alone together fifteen years later, disappointed and unhappy. Jonathan and Ruby tell each other the stories from when they first met because they “struggle to conceal their disappointments” of how life turned out for them. Ruby and Jonathan both divorced and separated their families just to be with one another because of this moment of excitement that they experienced on the three-week trip. “But all they have lost in order to be together would seem bearable had they continued to feel the way they felt on the island.” Barrett throughout the story gives different hints of the theme. People today will risk their jobs, their marriages and sadly even their kids to feel just a little passion. They then will think this lust is love and ruin their entire lives by marrying the person only to find out later that the excitement is gone. It then becomes a motif in people’s lives, doing the same thing over and over to feel some type of thrill in their mundane lives.
The ebbing tides of Jonathan and Ruby’s relationship mimicked the tides of the ocean. Jonathan and Ruby are both one-dimensional characters who now live in disappointment because of a poor choice. People always want exhilaration and some will risk everything to experience just a little like the main characters of the story. Andrea Barrett does a brilliant job of illustrating to the readers the aspects of the setting, characters, and the theme of her story with stunning diction and brilliant story telling


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